Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time made its debut last year, and it happened to revive one of the best and hardest platformers of all time (fight me). However, it recently launched on PC, exclusively on Battle.net, and was immediately hit with issues.
For some reason, the mostly single-player game, requires you to be online to actually play it, and because of that, people couldn't play the game at launch when Battle.net started experiencing issues with its authentication servers. Then, a cracking group broke the online requirements. Here's what happened.
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Crash has an online issue
We're currently investigating an issue affecting our authentication servers, which may result in failed or slow login attempts. #BlizzCSMarch 26, 2021
Soon after launch, Blizzard's authentication servers went offline for several hours, and since Crash Bandicoot 4 can't be played without an internet connection, players lost access to the game they just bought.
It didn't take long for Blizzard to fix the issue, however, as it announced that the servers fixed two hours later (opens in new tab). Although this isn't the first time that Blizzard has had server issues this month, so it's be frustrating to see this single player game bogged down by online issues.
On Saturday, Ars Technica reported that a cracking group broke the online requirements and got Crash Bandicoot 4 to play without having to be online. It's unclear why Blizzard-Activision went this route with Crash 4, especially when you can play the game offline on consoles.
Unless PC is your only option for playing Crash 4, I recommend staying away from this version, especially if you're prone to playing offline.